Thesis

I finally managed to finish and return my master’s thesis. It is about the theory of games, but unfortunately only available in Finnish. You can find it online, if you happen to be interested and understand Finnish. Please ignore the typo in the abstract. The thesis is for a quite limited audience. I thought I could post something interesting for the people that don’t understand Finnish by mentioning an interesting TED talk. Jane McGonigal spoke about the possibilities of using gaming to fix real-world problems in her talk titled Gaming can make a better world. You can blame her for being an optimist, but I really think you should watch the talk. For those of you that are in a hurry or have a short attention span, I gathered some highlights: ...

After moving into a new apartment and catching the most awful flu you ever experienced I’ve found that trying to keep up any kind of schedule for writing here has been a failure. I’ll try to correct that. Yesterday I sent my seminar paper to the seminar participants. I was forced to cut several pages to fit the length restrictions, which I still exceeded by few pages. While cutting off the excess, I tried to incorporate the feedback I got from my two helpful commentators. Thanks, jiituomas and Thanuir. The paper was far from perfect when I was through with it, but it was better than the draft I sent you. The parts that didn’t get in the paper will be useful when I continue writing on the subject. ...

I’ve been working on my second thesis seminar paper roughly from the beginning of the year. The paper is the second part of the seminar. Together they form my review of the history of game research - mostly the classic stuff starting from Huizinga. There was a lot of interesting things in there, but since I’ve already covered that quite thoroughly in my papers I’m not going to go over it again here. (The papers are, unfortunately, in Finnish. If you happen to be fluent and interested, feel free to ask me.) However, there was one text that was of particular interest: Roger Caillois’ Man, Play and Games. His analysis of game and play is very interesting, if a bit eclectic, but his idea of a sociology derived from games is quite positively intriguing. In the introduction, the translator Meyer Barash, puts it thusly: ...

Johann Huizinga’s “Homo Ludens” is one the classics in the study of play. I’ve been trying to read it but I also have a lot of essays to return during spring so my reading has been dragging itself slowly toward summer. I like the way Huizinga defines play. I’m reading it in Finnish, as I was lucky enough to find the book in my native language - it makes reading a bit more enjoyable and faster, but it also means I have to get my hands on at least the English version for comparison. Finnish is a tricky language for writing about play. Luckily, I found the definition in English also, so I don’t have trust my own translation for commenting on it. ...

I’ve been trying to come up with a topic for my master’s thesis for some time now. In March, I have to have some idea what I’m going to research. I suggested something related to play (or gaming), and was given thumbs up by the professors in charge of tutoring us. Now I have to discover what I am going study in my thesis; it seems that all the ideas I had have been examined by someone before me. ...

I managed to present my bachelor’s thesis last week’s Tuesday. The final topic was a bit cumbersome “Play: the philosophy of art and play by Gadamer”. It also had a subtitle of “comparison to a different concept of play”. We have a mysteriously silent tutor (apart from the furious attack on this weeks presentation, something that caught us all by surprise), so I have no idea how it went beside the fact that it seemed to have been accepted. ...